Week 6

What have I accomplished this week as a developer?

I feel like it’s been a long time since I worked on such a long project, this week in my mind was incredibly slow moving but when actually looking at what was accomplished it was pretty great. Things this week weren’t all great however, in classic timing after feeling immense pain in my mouth last weekend I found out that my wisdom teeth that had already come through sideways were now compacting all of my other teeth. Turning 25 in 2 weeks also meant I had to get new healthcare so with huge expenses coming up a lot of this week was running around to appointments to fix the problem before it becomes a more expensive one. With this came the struggle of good time management. When I only had limited hours that I could work not only having the time but also feeling well enough to do it from the pain was an interesting one. But for the first time in almost all of my study I like to think I got it right. Through the week the team was able to piece together everybody's parts of the greybox and go away and model our area specific models. This was fantastic to see as it made everything feel connected not only in the visuals but how the song really suited the game which was awesome to see. Then this weekend with I prioritised getting in all of the models or at least a first pass on the commercial district and after competing my modelling through the week I was able to piece together something I personally am happy with and hopefully our client is too. I am really looking forward to showing our client on monday and piecing everyone's first pass sectors together and be well on the way to a final product giving us a week of polish which I personally know some of my teammates are fantastic at. Keep an eye on my blog at the end of the week to see the final product!

What have I learned this week about development and being a developer?

Speaking about how successful the transition of putting our team's grey boxes together earlier really got me thinking. The only time I had previously done a greybox was in GDS111 my level design class. Even then my greybox ended up being my final product with only very minor changes to it. Actually going through the process of turning a greybox into a final product was an awesome learning experience. One thing specifically I learned it that when I greybox I make things insanely disproportionate. For example look at the picture above you can see the size of the building I had in the background which were from the greybox, whereas the buildings actually used were barely half the size. This greybox really taught me how to get proportions right, especially in relation to the player. If I had kept the buildings the size they were the player would have felt like an ant compared to the monoliths around him, this was far from the feeling out client was trying to portray so after getting the sizes right the desired feeling was much easier to find.